


Hope for an Echo

by signalbeam



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Post-Sburb, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-30
Updated: 2012-12-30
Packaged: 2017-11-23 00:56:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/616287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/signalbeam/pseuds/signalbeam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Dude, you were the one who texted me being all ‘hey, Dave, guess what, your sister hasn't been hijacked by some creepy red text AI and still has a physical shell after all, surprise. Oh, and she’s in my sweet crib.’ What did you expect.”<br/>“For you to have some common sense?” </p><p>After years of absence and radio silence, Rose pays Jade a visit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hope for an Echo

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Stripe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stripe/gifts).



> With special thanks to [MYSTERIOUS!], for helpfully not noticing as I mined her brain for characterization.

Winter plunged like a falcon to the fields, through the trees, between the lanes of the houses. The night before it had rained so hard that the trees lining the road by her physics lab had forfeited their leaves with a sense of comic fatalistic despair. It was fascinating to Jade, who was more interested in what could make a whole street of trees give up when September had ended just two weeks ago. Beneath the ruddy red and yellow were green leaves, all pressed flat to the street or sticking to the sidewalk, fixed there by the frozen rain. By the time she was rushing off to the intro to physics class she TA’d, a gathering of about twenty people had formed on the sidewalk. One man was standing on a branch, holding onto the trunk for support, and lecturing. 

It got weirder: Jade saw a woman walking away from the crowd with pale hair and skin the color of milk tea, but even smoother. It was Rose, or almost certainly Rose, wearing a white coat and with a knitted green scarf. Even from a distance Jade could see her black lips, make out the raised eyebrow. She tried to catch Rose’s eye, but either Rose didn’t notice her, or doesn’t recognize her, swaddled up in a coat and then a shawl and then as much knitwear as she could get away with without falling over, as the same girl who once appeared in front of her in a black dress and red shoes, and an extra set of ears. But Jade was certain it was Rose. It had to be her. She waved, and it went unnoticed—then she checked her watch again, and took off. 

 

Intro to physics met between eleven and noon three times a week. No one spoke in class, but this was more a function of the lecture format than the outstanding qualities of the students. Jade suspected half the class were asleep, and she didn’t blame them. What kind of hole in the ground did you have to live in to not know how to calculate massive vector boson fields? If she were sitting here, she’d be bored out of her skull, too. 

Technically Jade was supposed to be taking notes to help undergrads during recitation and office hours, but normally she kept herself busy with working on equations for her latest project at the quantum research facility at Illium, but by the half hour mark, her pen was still. By then she wasn’t sure if she had seen Rose at all. Maybe plenty of girls looked like that, though Jade doubted it a little! Still, it had been cold and there was a crowd—maybe her brain was substituting Rose’s face in for strangers’, creepy as that sounded, to make up for the long stretch of time since they had seen one another. No one had seen Rose in years, not even Dave. She had dropped out of college after the second semester, almost five years ago, and contacted them sporadically. She had gone to live in the mountains or something. The last time Jade saw Rose in person was in Boston three years ago. She had been prickly and curt; like she thought she might, at any moment, be in danger. 

Rose today—if that had been her at all, Jade reminded herself—seemed better. Jade tried to construct Rose’s face in her head to draw comparisons, but she hadn’t gotten a good look this morning, and now the past and the less-past-but-still-past and the current-but-technically-past Roses in her head were all blending together. A girl in orange, a girl in black with a green lens over one eye and a pink sash around her waist, a woman in Boston with bare lips and sunglasses on her face; and the woman she saw today in her white coat, with sly irony in the folds of her eyelids. Jade stared into the PowerPoint in hopes that Rose herself might materialize from the screen, or her mental picture resolve to the real Rose Lalonde, but she had been up late the whole week harvesting data from her little helium-3 battery, and now she was behind on getting data on the quantum phase transitions of a monolayer of superfluid He-4. When she closed her eyes, she saw the pulse of the He-3 battery LED: red, red, green. She called the battery What The Fucking Ever on bad days, and Space Baboon on good ones. 

After the lecture ended, Jade stayed a few minutes to explain concepts in lecture as fast as she could, and then took off back for the lab. She had done her undergrad years on the coast of California, and New York’s winters were proving to be four months of misery bookended by two months of hope thrashed by freak snowstorms and sudden frosts. All of the plants she brought from California had died webbed in damning frost, or from lack of light. She had bought replacement plants, tiny little things that spent most of their lives indoors and bloomed with a sense of great fragility every spring. Someone was waiting for her at the door, a man with bright blue eyes made brighter by the bruise-like exhaustion rimming along the bottom of his eye sockets, and hair that looked like it had been groomed by a lion’s tongue. His coat was too thin for the weather, and his lips were cracked and scabbed over. She didn’t recognize him from up close, or on level ground, but when she looked a little closer, she thought he was—maybe?—the man in the tree earlier this morning. When he saw her, he immediately strode towards her. Jade, with equal determination, lengthened her stride. It was easy to outpace him with the length of her legs, but then he began to jog, and a second later he was beside her. 

“What do you want?” Jade said. New York had taught her the value of directness. 

“Sorry, sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to intrude—” 

“If you don’t mean to intrude, then don’t stand in my way,” Jade said, crossing her arms. 

“—but you must know Lalonde, I saw it. She was watching you today—” 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jade said. “See you.” 

“But—”

“Sorry, but I never want to see you again! Bye!” 

She made sure to walk straight into a throng of students and then through the dining hall, not stopping until she was certain she had lost him. So it had been Rose after all. That was good to know. And Rose was in trouble? Afflicted with a case of can’t-shake-the-weird-stalker-itis? Jade was pretty certain Rose wasn’t dating the guy or anything, but what did she know about Rose’s romantic life? She could call John and ask, maybe—but that’d be so weird. She didn’t want to touch Rose’s romantic life if she could avoid it. Then again, hers involved a bird who had broken up with her because he thought it was creepy when she licked his neck. 

She walked back to the labs. The crowd had vanished. Someone had come by to clear the leaves from the sidewalk and the road, and left most of them clumped on the grass. As Jade walked by the tree the man had been standing in, she saw that someone had scribbled, in chalk, what could only be described as a spell circle. 

 

It was nearly ten by the time Jade finished playing around with lab data and headed back home. The lab had thick walls and cell phone reception ranged from bad on the top floors to nonexistent. Her coworkers complained of missing calls and texts while they were down below, working with the cryostats. Jade, who rarely received phone calls or texts from anyone but Dave and John, rarely cared enough to run back upstairs and take a call. When she emerged from the lab this time, Rose was waiting for her on a chair by the main entrance, with a suitcase beside her. 

“Rose?” Jade said. She stood and bent down a bit to give Rose a hug. “So you were here after all!” 

“That I am,” Rose said, returning the hug with initial trepidation. A second later, Jade felt Rose’s grip around her ribs tighten a bit. She was less bony than she had been in Boston, which was more or a relief than Jade thought. “I tried to call you, but you didn’t pick up.” 

“I was in the basement.” Jade let Rose go and straightened up. “Gosh, it’s been so long. I don’t know what to say.” 

“I know,” Rose said, sounding guilty. “I really should be better about it, but I’ve been busy. Not as busy as you’ve been, I’m sure.” 

“Oh, I’m not that busy,” Jade said, and then frowned, because on second thought, she guessed that she… really was that busy? Wow. That just made her feel a little cross with Rose. Only a little. Being friends with Rose sometimes meant accepting long absences and being a little worried. 

“I saw you this morning, but couldn’t go to you until now, actually. I had to take care of some business.” 

“What kind of business?” 

“It’s a long story, but suffice to say, it’s for a good cause.” When Jade rolled her eyes, Rose hit her shoulder lightly. Not hard enough for it to hurt, and without the force of someone who was really offended by the lack of trust Jade was showing. In a way that stung more, or would have, if she were more sentimental. 

“How long have you been in town?” 

“Not for long. Only a day or so. I’ve been staying with a friend, but we had a falling out and… Well, it turns out that I need a place to stay.” 

“Okay,” Jade said. “For how long?” 

Rose grew awkward at this, for a moment looking as freely bashful as she had when Jade asked her about what she had been doing on the meteor years ago. Those had been different times. A whole universe apart. But what did she expect? Having Rose over meant preparing extra meals, or budgeting money for meals out, spending less time at work to take care of her guest and also picking up her laundry off her floor—too late to do that now. She was happy to have Rose over. But she kind of had a life. 

“Not long,” Rose said. “No more than three days, I promise. I’ll stay out of your hair.” 

“Okay,” Jade said. “Three days is fine. I mean, you can stay as long as you need to, as long as you don’t kill my flowers or bring in any cats.” 

“I thought you were okay with cats.” 

“Um, have you seen them? They’re evil.” 

Rose laughed at this, and picked up her suitcase. “Where do you live?” 

 

Jade’s apartment was in a complex halfway between the lab and the main town. From the balcony, she could see both up and down the sloping hill: the town’s neat houses and the more distant vineyards below, and the imposing white stone buildings above. 

“Does your work keep you out late often?” Rose said. She dragged her suitcase over to the couch and sat on it with a sigh. It had taken them both to haul the suitcase up to the third floor. Jade wondered what was inside it; certainly more, she suspected, than just some clothes for a week’s trip. 

“Not all the time. I just spent all of last week working on a side project.” She went to fetch a blanket and a pillow from her bedroom and tossed them next to Rose. “You’ll have to sleep here. It’s a little thin, but it’s the only one I have.” 

“It’ll work fine,” Rose said. “Two days from now it’ll be seventy degrees, believe me.” She looked about the apartment, as though she was thinking about something. Maybe taking stock of Jade’s meager possessions: a kitchen table, two chairs, a couch; old issues of _Physica C_ and _Journal of Physics G_ piled up in the milk crates she stole from the dining hall. The three potted plants, now just bare and flowerless vines and stems. “You really haven’t changed much, have you?” 

“Um, I guess not,” Jade said, which seemed the more appropriate thing to say than insisting that she definitely had. She _felt_ different, but maybe part of that was being an adult who lived in an actual place with people in it instead of being a girl on an island with nothing but a dog and her taxidermied grandfather. “And you’ve changed a lot! Or only a little. I don’t know what I’m saying.” 

“It’s been a pretty weird eight years,” Rose said. 

“I guess so,” Jade said. She had a supervisor now, which drove her mad sometimes, and a PI, who was either a moron or just illiterate. But she kept these thoughts to herself, though working in a lab—working under someone in a lab—drove her nuts. At thirteen she knew more about nuclear physics than any other person under the age of twenty-one; at twenty-four she had either plateaued or slowed, or maybe should have done genetic engineering with plants. It’d be more satisfying than poking at two dimensional planes of quivering helium-4. “What have you been up to lately?” 

“Honestly?” Rose said. 

Jade waited for Rose to continue, before realizing that she was waiting for Jade to prompt her. “Yes?” 

Rose, for a moment, looked torn. She took a deep breath, and as she did so her eyebrows pushed together, then furrowed, then froze into an expression of either alarm or fear—fear of what? Jade wondered, bewildered. “I joined a band five years ago. It broke up in February. I’ve been ghost writing children’s horror novels ever since.” 

“A _band_?” Jade said. “That’s pretty cool.” But when she tried to imagine it, she couldn’t. Wouldn’t Rose seem happier if that were the case? Rose had liked music, sure, but Jade couldn’t imagine Rose going off to join a band—she was almost certain Rose was lying to her. In the eight years since she entered “society,” whatever that meant, she had gotten used to the way truth shifted from the Internet and into real life. People like Rose, Jade knew, might want to be honest and straightforward, but might find themselves self-defeated, pushed back to circumlocution or silence. Falseness in real life had a metallic glare, subtle but visible. Internet truth was like a three dimensional puzzle that you only saw one side of at a time, fitting one part here, one part there. 

“It was a small one. They needed someone on violin. Now that the haze has lifted a little, it seems pretty obvious why we never took off. I was the only one who could keep a tempo.” 

Jade giggled, and then said, “So that guy I saw earlier was one of your old bandmates?” 

“Do you mean…” Rose gestured to her face, and made her eyes buggy and intense. Jade nodded. “Yes. Yes he was. By coincidence we were staying with the same mutual friend.” 

“What was,” Jade began, but Rose said, “I’m sorry, but do you mind if I take a shower? It’s been a long day.” 

She wasn’t offended, but it did strike her as strange. One falsehood on top of another. “Yeah, go ahead. There’s an extra towel in the cabinet. Do you need anything else? I have a lot of…” What did she have? “Steak.” 

“No, I’m good.” She stood slowly, cracking her spine as she straightened up. She put a hand on Jade’s shoulder, as though to steady herself. A part of her must still be part dog; she leaned into Rose’s touch, eager for more, but Rose’s hand fell away a second later. Rose shucked off her coat, then the sweater she was wearing beneath that, leaving only the salmon pink shirt and plain pants. Jade could see, though, a faint green script stitched into the inside the wrist of her coat. Green, the color of moss—Jade looked away, feeling strangely guilty. As though she had seen something she shouldn’t have. 

“I’m sorry about what happened about your friend,” Jade said, rising, too. She had to finish putting together a summary of what she had done for tomorrow’s group meeting. She had totally forgotten until now. “The one you had a fight with, I mean.”

“Oh?” Rose said. She looked confused only momentarily, and with a shrug said, “Me too.” 

 

At six in the morning she got a call from Dave. 

“Isn’t it three in the morning in Portland?” Jade said, squinting blindly at the pale line of blue on the eastern horizon outside her window. “Oh my god, Dave.” 

“Dude, you were the one who texted me being all ‘hey, Dave, guess what, your sister hasn't been hijacked by some creepy red text AI and still has a physical shell after all, surprise. Oh, and she’s in my sweet crib.’ What did you expect.” 

“For you to have some common sense?” she said. “I’m really tired, and if I don’t have to be up until eight, I don’t want to be woken up at six!” 

“Whoa, calm down. Geeze. Sorry. Thought you’d still be up discovering cold fusion and whatever. Just tell me if she’s doing okay.” 

“She’s fine. She’s really pretty when she’s sleeping! Is that good enough for you?” 

“Wait,” he said. “You gotta tell me more, Harley, you’re killing me here—”

She hung up. But she couldn’t get back to sleep. She clenched her eyes shut, pressed the heel of her palms on the lids, and pressed; all this did was set off a spark of ill-defined colors in the back of her eyelids. She imagined the concerts she had seen on TV, with the jets of fire and thousands of people pressed shoulder to shoulder. Rose there with her violin, Rose giving a virtuoso’s performance—but she had never been that motivated for music, and the more Jade tried to picture this, the more it collapsed, and the more she tried to rebuild it. Finally, cranky and frustrated, she got out of bed and rested her elbows on her knees. Took deep breaths, and told herself to get a grip. She should just trust Rose. They were friends, after all. Who knew what surprises one person could have. The kind of strength or speed hidden in even ordinary people. 

She tiptoed to the kitchen—but Rose wasn’t on the couch. Jade for a moment to panic, but then she saw Rose in her white coat on the balcony. She went to the glass and gave it a tap. Rose didn’t seem to hear her, so she rapped a little harder. Rose jumped a little, then turned back, eyes wide and hair matted on one side of her head. She stepped back into the apartment. She smelled like winter, crisp and clean, cool wind rising off of her like the fur off an angry cat’s back. 

“What are you doing?” 

“I like rising with the sun,” Rose said, sounding weirdly defensive. “It reminds me of the game, and makes me feel like a more virtuous citizen. My mother used to tell me that waking up early was the only way I’d ever be able to be a productive citizen of the world, perhaps not accounting for how you can wake up early and never, not even once, go to work.” 

Her face in the sun was soft and kind. When she yawned, her teeth looked… Jade rubbed at her eyes. They looked like teeth. “Well, I have to get to work soon,” she said. “But I’ll see you this evening, right? We can get dinner.” 

“Yes. I’ll look forward to it.” 

“Uh-huh,” Jade said, distracted primarily by Rose’s hair, tinged blue in the shadows, and orange where the light touched it. Get a grip, she told herself. And get more sleep. She wouldn’t be having this problem if Dave just waited a little longer. She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, and Rose was sitting on the couch, looking up at Jade. She wrapped the blanket around herself like a shawl. “Yeah?” Jade said. 

“I lied when I said I had a falling out with my friend,” Rose said. Well, duh. Jade wasn’t stupid. “The truth is, I knew you were at Illium, but I didn't want to call you right away. When I saw you, I decided, why wait longer?” 

“Aw,” Jade said. “That’s really sweet of you.” 

“I hope I’m not inconveniencing you.” 

“You aren’t,” Jade said, and Rose smiled, small and genuine. Blue-shadowed and pretty, too, when she was awake. Get a grip, Harley! She shivered a little, and went straight to the kitchen to make her coffee. She made sure to not stare at Rose as she drifted back to sleep. 

 

The streets were nearly empty as she walked up to the labs, and the labs, too, were silent. Intro to physics didn’t meet today, though she had a few classes in the late afternoon and group meetings later in the morning. The prospect of having to teach filled her with an instinctive impatience. She could see why her grandfather had devoted himself to doing research by himself on the island, and Jade would have done the same, if she craved the loneliness that much. The game had ended, and with the game, everything that had made the island tolerable vanished: Prospit gone, Bec dead, and the absence of so many of her friends. Dead or merely away? Both options were upsetting. The only thing she had left there was the house, which had taken a turn for the really creepy, and her plants. She could see plants anywhere. So she left. 

When she stepped out for her afternoon classes, the man from the day before was crouched on the sidewalk with a piece of chalk. Of course he had drawn it. Big surprise, she guessed. She hoped to escape across the road, but he saw her, and rose up. It was okay, Jade reminded herself. She’d use him for information, that was all. 

“You know Rose, right?” she said, before he could say anything. 

He shrugged, gratingly playing at oblivious. “What happened to ‘I never want to see you again?’” 

“First of all, I don’t sound like that,” Jade said. “Also, yesterday you sounded a lot like a stalker, so I was on my guard.” She checked her watch, and regarded the man again. Then she said, “What do you want with her?” 

“I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” he said. “But I need your blood. Or an inch of flesh. Come on, you can grow more.”

“What? Ew!” 

“It’s for the ceremony tonight,” he said. “Do you want to know when?” 

“Not if you’re going to bleed me for it, you jackshit!” she said. 

“Fine,” he said. “Fine, go then. But tell Lalonde it’s happening here at midnight. I’ll do it. I’ll do it and it’ll work, you’ll see.” He bent back down at his chalk circle, and wrote something. Letters? Numbers? The rough asphalt made the writing look like gibberish. It might as well be gibberish. When the new world was created, there was nothing: no sylladices, no weird crosshairs in her vision when she pulled out her rifle, The world felt naked and bare, like a robot without a brain, just a light flashing at nothing. Magic, even if could have worked before, wouldn’t now. 

“Ugh,” Jade said, and headed up the hill. The sky was cloudy and the wind was picking up—it’d snow that evening, or so she heard. She couldn’t imagine what Rose had done with that guy, the kinds of collaboration they had done. She drew her scarf around her, and kept moving. 

 

When she started walking home, it was snowing: fat flakes accumulating on railings of the stairs, snow on top of the leaves. She stopped by the center of town to buy an extra blanket for Rose. The usual general store was crowded with people purchasing toilet paper, bread, and eggs; strangely enough, the ice cream shop, too, had people packed inside. She bought the blanket from a crafts store, and exited with the blanket under her arm. She was barely past the ice cream shop when she saw Rose coming up the hill on the other side of the road with deliberately wintry expression. She was dressed in severe black and heels, and her hair was pulled away from her face; Jade took a moment to stop and watch Rose head up and then disappear into an office. Jade’s face was filled with the heat that came from the cringing embarrassment of a trespasser, but still she crossed the street and went carefully to the building where Rose had vanished into. It had a list of the services offered in the lobby: a salon and a cafe on the first floor, and on the second a small law firm. She walked away quickly, trying to make herself inconspicuous. But the faster she walked, the angrier she got. 

She was back in the apartment twenty minutes later. Rose’s suitcase was open. There were clothes, of course, most of them tossed in and around absently or badly folded, but there was also an empty space at the bottom, square-shaped depression pressed into socks and a half-folded t-shirt. A box, or a book? Jade shut the suitcase and tossed the bought blanket across the couch. Then she went to her room, cleared her desk, and set her cleaning kit on the surface. Got her rifle from the closet. Then she sat down and set to work. 

This wasn’t her favorite rifle or even the prettiest or the best, but it was Grandpa’s, and she wanted something in the house that reminded her of him. Something that wasn’t his body, which she had to leave behind because when she asked customs about it, they just looked at her funny. She unscrewed the mount and scope. Opened the bolt, pulled the trigger, pulled bolt away. She wiped the wooden stock with a towel, thought about getting something to touch up the finish, decided to do it later. Wiped down the barrel, the tip of her fingers slipping into the grooves of the rifle as she went, flesh yielding against the metal. Then she set to work. 

Was Rose in trouble? That was the question she had to figure out. Rose was lying to her, and she wasn’t even lying all that well. Rose wasn’t as close to her as she was to John or Dave, Jade knew that. She guessed it was because Rose didn’t really like it when Jade was being all oracle-y and stuff. Then in the game itself, Rose had vanished on her dumb doom mission—but when she came off the meteor, she had seem so happy and cheerful. Like she believed that anything was possible. She steered everyone with earnest pleasure, guided them from one point to another like she believed in benevolence. She had faith in the universe then, and friends, and—well, she had Kanaya back then, didn’t she? Troll romance, or maybe just plain dating. 

It wasn’t as though no one else had lost anything, and it wasn’t like they could’ve done anything else. It had been inevitable, anyway. The only thing they could’ve done besides dying. None of them had wanted to say goodbye—she pushed the cleaning rod further down the barrel. The truth was, she and Rose never hit it off before the game. They talked, sure, and they were friends, but Jade couldn’t help letting bits of what she had seen on Prospit come out, and Rose never liked for someone to have a hand over her. Maybe she wasn’t competitive, but like a precocious child, tortured constantly by an awareness in her own helplessness and lack of power. Anyone would feel that if they had once been a god, and now found themselves arguing with the PI over magnets six days out of seven, but Rose had been born with a chip on her shoulder.

That was one of the frustrating things about growing up, see. Growing up, moving on, and then backsliding like an fuckwit, landing ass-first in the same problems as before. 

When she finished cleaning the rifle, she reassembled it and she took a breath, and let her hands arrange themselves along the gun while still at her desk. The stock was smooth against her shoulder, her hands fit comfortably into old spots. She knew how this worked: the scope’s wandering eye, the target in her head. The way that her heart rate went up with every millimeter of slack she pressed through as she depressed the trigger until she reached resistance. Sitting down, the recoil would probably knock the chair back and make her fall, but she imagined standing in the middle of the woods, a deer or a dragon in view. There, standing in the shade of the trees, the recoil wouldn’t be so bad, like absorbing a punch to the shoulder from her Grandpa’s heavy fist. She imagined the impact, and imagined the bullet, and breathed out steady and slow. Then she put the gun back in her closet and went to wash her hands. The water over her hands irritated her ears with its weak, irregular noise.

 

It was dark and late when Rose returned. The windows were whited out, and Jade had stuffed some unused sheets along the cracks of the windows and glass balcony doors to keep the cold from coming in. Rose was still in her dress. She went to the bathroom and came out in something more casual, but still bundled up, as though she was preparing to step outside at any moment. Jade felt her anger curling on itself, a weird snakey circle of her rising temper and another part of her telling that part of her to shut up. 

“Hello,” Rose said, only a little awkwardly. 

“Going out again?” 

“Something’s come up. I can’t stay long.” Rose drew in a breath, and said, “I think I’ll need your help with directions.” 

“Why?” Jade said, some of her anger lightening. “Are you in trouble?” 

“Someone I know might be,” Rose said. “Remember bug eyes?” 

“Huh,” Jade said. There was a bit of grease trapped under her fingernail. She fetched it out and smeared it along the tip of her finger. “What do you want?” 

“Where can I get a cow in town?” 

“I don’t know, Rose. There are tons of cows around here. Maybe there are some in the biology labs. Unless you’re talking about a dead one, because then you can get that from a supermarket.” 

“Are you upset about something?” 

Was there anything to be upset about? Yes, there was something to be upset about. Jade tried to get it in her head: the what and the how, the lying—she had never, before today, felt as though she was in danger of losing Rose, but now all she could see was a whole eight years where no one knew what Rose was doing or where she was going. They knew she was alive, or hoped for it. She didn’t know, she couldn’t put it together or take it apart. All she could see was herself working the cryostats in the basement of the physics lab, entombed alone in a building of pale stone, all her talents wasted on examining tiny atoms, all her energy spent fencing with her PI and her advisor. _Not only under ground are the brains of men/Eaten by maggots._ Her PI had given her that poem when Jade got an award from the university for groundbreaking research, thinking it would make Jade smile at the mention of flowers and spring. 

“Yes.” 

There was a little moment, where Jade focused very hard on the clear lubrication spread thin on the side of her knuckle. She could perceive Rose, out of focus, shifting the scarf around her neck: a deep, mossy green, the color of space. “I’m sorry you feel that way,” she said, and Jade then wished she could have hit something, or kicked Jadesprite. “I’m going out then. Wish me luck.” 

“You shouldn’t go out,” Jade said. “It’s coming down pretty hard. What if you get hurt?” 

“A little bit of snow has never killed anyone,” Rose said. 

“Let me come with you.” 

“Oh, I couldn’t,” Rose said. “Lest I somehow offend your temper, and wind up shot through the back of the head in a dark and shady patch of woods.” 

“You’re being dumb about this,” Jade said. “You don’t even know where he is or where he could be. Who is he, anyway?” 

“A band member.”

“There is no band, Rose!” She was shouting now, her arms out in front of her like she was carrying a heavy ball and straining to keep it up. “I know there’s no band—anyone with a brain could know there’s no band. There’s no band and you’re associated with some guy who wanted me to give him my blood for some dumb magic trick. I want to help you, but I can’t help you if you’re being all dumb and broody. Get over yourself, Rose! I’m sick of dealing with you being mysterious.” 

Rose was still standing by the door, and for a moment she looked angry enough to just leave, her shoulders turned away so severely that it looked as though she was about to spin away there. “‘Broody’ and ‘mysterious?’” she said incredulous. “‘Get over…’ You have no idea what I’ve been doing these last years—if you were my friend, then you’d wait until I come it upon my own time—”

“You’ve had five years of ‘your own time,” Jade said, rising to her feet. Rose, instead of leaving, stepped towards her. She was never one, Jade knew, to back down once she was in a bad mood. “You make it seem like you think I’d never be able to understand what you’ve done, but it’s easy enough to see, isn’t it! You were trying to find a way to the other side and now you’re in trouble. We’re friends, aren’t we? I don’t care if you’ve killed someone or kicked them or even if you threw some old lady into the middle of a freeway. Let me help you.” 

“It’s not so easy.”

“I won’t hurt you,” Jade said. 

“I didn’t want to worry you. I saw you today when you were going to the lawyer’s office. Did you know how unsubtle you are whenever you try to sneak? It’s like watching the BFG tiptoe in a dollhouse.” 

“What’s so worrying about a _lawyer_?” 

“If you listen to some people, lawyers are literally Satan. Every single one of them. Even when there’s more than one in the room.” When Jade didn’t laugh, Rose said, “I thought that was pretty funny.”

“Ha, ha,” Jade said. 

Rose rubbed her hands together, as though she was cold. Then she reached to put her hand on Jade’s upper arm—a stranger’s way of expressing condolences, or just a creepy old man maneuver to cop a feel. She withdrew her hand a moment later and said, “It’s a long story, but if you come with me, I promise I’ll tell you as much as I can on the way. When we get back, I’ll explain everything. … It probably won’t even take that long when I think about it.” 

“Deal,” Jade said. She opened her arms, thinking even as she did it that Rose wouldn’t want to. But Rose stepped in. There was a single vibrating inch between them, the borders of their boundaries resisting one another until the air between them collapsed. Rose’s arms, small as they were, were like bars trapping the two of them in an unsteady hug. Just before they parted, Jade felt Rose’s lips on her neck. The contact, incidental, set her trembling and cold. 

“Forgive me,” Rose said, but as a question, the severe imperative form softened with a sigh against Jade’s ear and the warmth of her palms pressed into the back of her shoulder blades. 

 

Before they left, Rose took a book out of her bag. Leather-bound in black, with gold lettering on the side: _A History of Alternia and Sburbia_ by Rose Lalonde. It was the book that had created those dents at the bottom of Rose’s suitcase. It was smaller than Jade thought it’d be. When Jade saw it, Rose covered turned the spine so her fingers covered it and said, “It’s the bible, of sorts.” 

“Are you still writing wizard slash?” Jade said. 

“My editors told me I should stick with non-fiction.” 

They walked fast. The snow was settling down, the plows had been deployed, but still soon Rose’s cream coat was covered in ice, and the places where Jade’s layers didn’t overlap perfectly let in a thin film of cold air that curled around her skin. It was half an hour on foot normally, more so when the sidewalks were barely shoveled, and the roads icy. Smaller cars wobbled like drunk goats, bigger ones zipped along with their usual shameless confidence and made Jade want to yell at them about danger and risk.

What had Rose done in the three years before she dropped out of college and then vanished? There had been no band. Her mother, like the other guardians, remained dead. Her brother had been brought back in Houston, John in Washington, Jade on her island in the Pacific Ocean. There was nothing else but her and the house she had grown up in. All the trolls were gone. Outside it was spring. 

She had always imagined that the reward would be greater than what they got. Magic, gone. God powers, gone. Not even a single sylladex remained. Any and all forms of virtual reality simply no longer existed. Some crucial bit of history had been redone. But what was there to do? She could stay in this house forever, ignoring the rest of the world and eventually losing her mind and possibly swallowing a shard of glass, but she was still certain that there’d be something more: some way to contact the trolls, some way to make this reality bear its fruit. Until then, she had to do _something._ Rose called the family lawyers, set her affairs in order, went to school, and at eighteen, went off to college in Boston. Rose, who was fond of rhetorical questions, asked what she had done. She hadn’t gotten “over.” In fact, she resented “over” and its implications. She had been the Seer of Light. She knew all the ways that the universe could fit together: a push here, a nudge there, and things could have been so different. She missed Kanaya, she missed Karkat, and she missed her friends. Going to college was supposed to be a new start, but half a semester in she felt a screaming loneliness and frustration. The school counselor had funneled her to various support groups, and that was when she found the witches. 

There had to be something more, she thought, and she found it. It was the first time she had met anyone who even believed in magic in years, and while she wasn’t fooling herself, she wasn’t naive, but she wanted more, she wanted more than this: dingy Boston in the autumn, lectures that began with, “What is _psychology_ ,” a pathological loneliness and yearning. It would’ve been easier if she knew that the trolls had all died, if she could see them as a horrible fuel for their new world, instead of living with the persistent thought in the back in her head that it still might be possible, if she cared hard enough, for her to rip a hole through the universe and yank the trolls back in. Of course, it wouldn’t be that easy. She told herself she knew it’d be impossible. All she was doing here was a kind of exorcism, and maybe checking if one of the girls might be interested in an exploration of Sapphic tendencies. She hadn’t expected to convince them of her vision of another universe that laid somewhere behind this one, nor did she expect them to have her lead them there. Belief fueled belief. She had been the Seer of Light once. She could be so again. 

“Oh, Rose!” Jade said—Rose turned away, and in the night’s blackened jaws with its teeth of cold and snow, it was impossible to tell whether she was blushing or whether the cold had nipped her face and ears. 

“It’s no big deal,” she said. “I feel pretty stupid about it. Do you know how I snapped out of it? I was seeing this girl, and one day when I woke up, she was reading an HP Lovecraft book. I borrowed it from her and it was like…” She trailed off, and then smiled dryly. “Well, it was that moment when you realize you had spent four years of your life on holing yourself up in a cabin in Pennsylvania for no reason.” 

No reason—Jade didn’t think there was no reason. The trolls had existed at one point, they were all sure of it. And if they did it once, why _not_ again? Jade reached over and flapped her shawl so part of it fell over Rose’s back—when that proved too cold, she snapped it back around herself. “We were all lonely,” she said. “Grandpa hid a lot of his money in underground safes, but he didn’t leave a map or anything. So after a while I got mad and started blowing up chunks of the island, even though there was a volcano right next to me.” 

“Really?” 

“Yeah, it wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done,” Jade said, a little abashed. “But when I think about it, I was almost hoping it’d blow up. It’d be something to do besides sit on the island all day by myself. I wish—I wish you had said something to us, or reached out more. In a way I missed you more than I missed Karkat or Kanaya, because you were here but not here. I wish you didn’t have to do all that alone. Including the weird cult thing.” 

“I understand,” Rose said, and brought the scarf up to cover her nose. “It was a strange eight years. I applied for religious exemptions, did you know that? That’s what I was doing today with the lawyer: officially dissolving that whole mess.” 

“Yeah,” Jade said, and was not willing to go on further. They were only a few minutes from the biology lab now. The animal research labs were some distance from the quantum physics lab, shoved into an older building with an extensive basement. Jade had only been inside a few times. “So who’s this guy we’re going after?” 

“Wilcox. A zealot, if you can believe it. Most of the people began to drift off after the third or fourth year, including me. He came in just before we all gave up pretending that any of what we were doing was something other than a crock of shit. Unfortunately, our doubt inflamed his devotion. He was staying with the same person I was, actually. I got a call from my friend after I finished with the lawyer, and she said that she got a call from the police asking if she had seen a cow.” 

“And you just assumed… that’s a bit of a leap.” 

“Not if you need something to bleed or to sacrifice.” At Jade’s look, Rose said, a little sheepish, “I thought the bible needed a little more gore.” 

The snow had lightened a bit by then, more like a steady pattern of fine dots than distinct flakes. Jade’s thighs were numb, and every step she took made her muscles ache, as though they were liquefying instead of becoming tightening from the cold. No one was on the road or the sidewalk. Jade swiped into the lab, and saw no signs that anyone but then had come by: the floor was dry, without a hint of someone coming in with clumps of snow stuck to the bottom of their pants legs. They marched up to the physics lab, their breaths trailing behind them like furious flags. As they neared the lab, other footprints in the snow emerged: boots and then hooves, going both up and down the hill. There was a lump, about halfway up: a man and an enormous beast with straight legs. It had horns, curving in a way that made Jade slow, and remember a lot of commas, and a bullet in her Grandpa’s chest. 

“You’ve arrived at the key moment!” said bug eyes. Wilcox. Whatever. He had a knife hanging from his waist, long and definitely not for cutting fruit. The bull next to him seemed unfazed by the man holding the end of the twine wrapped around its leg; its ear was tagged, and someone had scrawled in marker on a shaved piece of skin on its flank “surgery 09/19/2020.” 

“Wilcox, stop being an ass,” Rose said. “Cynthia’s worried sick.”

“She doesn’t have to worry,” Wilcox said. “Soon I won’t even be in this world. I’ll be gone. I’ll be gone!” He tugged at the twine attached to the bull’s leg, and grunted when the bull did nothing but move its head back and forth. The sleeve of his shirt was stained dark, and dragged down heavily. 

“Trying to get the cow to stand in the middle of the spell circle?” Rose said kindly. “Give it up, Wilcox. It’s not happening.” He ignored her in favor of yanking at the string harder. 

Jade leaned in and said, “I think he’s hurt.” 

“Well, he’s obviously mad. I never knew how far he had gone. Why didn’t I notice?” 

“I mean his arm,” Jade said. “It’s hard to tell, but I’m pretty sure he’s bleeding. What were you thinking when you wrote that dumb bible? I can’t believe you told people to cut off chunks of their own arms!” 

“I did it as a joke,” Rose said. “I didn’t think anyone would actually _read_ it—it was always understood that some parts weren’t—never mind, I know. I’m sorry.” 

“Well, tell that to him!” 

But overcome with ashamed guilt, she said instead, “How did you get that cow, Wilcox? We didn’t notice anyone entering the biology labs.” 

“No one keeps a cow inside,” Wilcox said. “Maybe you’re some seer of sun, but I can read a goddamned map. Fucking animal!” He tugged at the bull again, and the twine broke. He slipped in the slushy, icy road, falling with such a lack of grace that Jade expected to hear him crack his skull on the pavement. But after a moment he pushed himself up again onto his elbows. His left arm trembled badly. Rose covered her face with her hand and sighed, but Jade felt sorry for Wilcox and the bull. It wasn’t as though Wilcox was crazy for believing what Rose had said or wanting to go to the places Rose had described. Those things were real, or once had been so. Once everything had been different. She tried to keep that in mind as she stepped towards him: Rose would be no help here. She'd see only a durable hope she was determined to stab through with needles. Jade knew the feeling well. 

“Are you okay?” Jade said. When Rose opened her mouth, looking fully prepared to unleash some blistering ironic remark, Jade stepped on her toes. “You aren’t hurt, are you?” 

“Just stay away,” he said. “Didn’t you want me to go away?” 

“Yes, I do,” Jade said. “But you’re going to hurt yourself. Can’t you do it later when the weather’s better?” 

“The dark gods don’t wait until ‘the weather’s better,’” he said. “For god’s sake.” The bull grunted, and began to head down the hill again. He grabbed one of its hoofs and yanked. 

“Don’t _do_ that!” Jade shouted. The bull grunted, and kept moving. Wilcox gave it another tug, and the bull spun around, or as close as he could do so. One of his great hooves slammed down onto Wilcox’s chest, another narrowly missing a knee—the bull lost its footing, and slid. It pivoted on the foot on Wilcox’s chest, and its rear legs went skidding. Jade felt something hit her feet, and then she was no longer standing on anything. For a moment she thought, hopefully, _I must be flying_ , and then was aware of something striking the side of her head, then of delayed pain. Her glasses were askew and the world had cracked. She knew for certain that Wilcox’s dumb ceremony hadn’t succeeded, but everything looked fractured; she saw Rose leaning over Wilcox, then Wilcox jumping up with his knife—Jade was on her feet fast, the world and her feet heading in opposing directions. The knife tore through the book, made it spill its printed innards—Rose tripped him back to the ground easily. Jade was on him in a second. He was a slim man, long-limbed and knobby, but she pushed him down easily enough: grabbing onto his bleeding forearm, twisting his whole arm so it strained in the socket. Once he was subdued, Rose bent down and took Wilcox in a chokehold and held him there until his eyes fluttered. For his own safety, or their security. Rose's hands flexed around something slim. The book she left stabbed in the middle of the road.

Rose helped Jade up and said, “Are you all right? I heard you hit your head.” 

“Are my glasses broken?” she said. 

“Just one lens. Were you unconscious?” 

“Ummm,” Jade said, because she wasn’t sure. 

“You should have stayed back,” Rose said. “I hope what you did was worth it, because,” and her words vanished into a strange numb feeling in Jade’s ears. It was snowing. Still snowing, more like. 

“I think I’m a little concussed.” 

“Give me your ID. I need to get you both in the lab before you freeze.” 

“Don’t touch me,” Jade said, as she took out her ID. “You’re wearing white.” Wilcox’s blood was on her fingers. She wiped it off on the snow. 

Once they were in, Rose left Wilcox on a bench and stepped back out to call the campus medical service. Jade sat down on the floor next to Wilcox. He was alive, mouth open and tongue pink between his lips. His fingers were not bright red with blood as she thought they'd be, but rusty and dark. Outside in the blue night, the cow remained prone on the ground, legs kicking in the air occasionally; Rose stood away from it, spoke with her chin tucked to her scarf and her hair whipping around her head. She was clothed from neck to wrist to ankle. Jade forced herself to stand up and go to the door. She opened it for Rose when she was done with the phone, and then took Rose’s hand. 

“Are you hurt?” she said. “Are you hurt anywhere?” 

“I just went outside for a call,” Rose said. “Are you sure you’re all right? What are you doing?” 

Jade pushed Rose’s sleeve up. Rose pushed it back down. But the need to know was like a heavy rock pinning her down; she was taller and stronger than Rose—she got a hold of the sleeve, and rolled it to Rose’s wrist. 

“I just want to see,” Jade said. The wrist was pale from the cold, green veins far below the surface, like fish flitting beneath the ice. The inside of her forearm was smooth and bare, and the forearm itself had pale hairs, longest across the middle and thinning out to near nonexistence at the bony bump of her wrist. The other arm was the same: Kanaya’s green mark left there beneath the skin—already paler than it had been on the screen. She was so grateful that Rose was all right—she couldn’t even explain it. She held onto Rose’s hands, and squeezed them until Rose began to blush. 

“There,” Rose said, rolling both sleeves back down. “Are you satisfied?”

“You have really pretty arms,” Jade said. 

“Thank you,” Rose said, without any demureness. “I could say the same of yours.” 

“So’s your mouth.” 

“I—” Rose said, brow furrowing in confusion. Jade kissed her, quick and spontaneous, and completely blind. When Rose didn’t recoil in horror, she leaned in again, hopeful and sure. Rose’s hand came up behind Jade’s neck, pressed her in. Her mouth opened, lips for a moment pushing out against the side of Jade’s cheek—they kissed with a familiarity that they had barely given to each other during the last two days. Rose’s tongue flicked up, from Jade’s lower lip to the roof of her mouth, and then she pulled back, saying, “You’re concussed, aren’t you?” with such uncertainty—Jade kissed her the side of her mouth, her nose, her chin until Rose changed the angle of her head just enough for their lips to meet again. They stayed that until the lights from the emergency medical technicians’ van cast red and blue light across the snow. 

 

She was given an icepack, aspirin, and orders of twenty-four hours of bed rest, and then driven home by the university van service. Rose rode next to her, one hand steady on Jade’s back and her head against her shoulder. 

“It doesn’t even hurt that much anymore,” Jade tried to protest, but no one listened to her. 

“Just think of it as a snow day,” Rose said. “Nine inches isn’t enough for a university to cancel classes. By morning the whole place will be cleared up.” 

“What! That sucks. I hate this state.” 

She collapsed on the couch, curling her legs to her chest. To think that she had once been a god, once only felled by exploding shipments of shaving cream. Now she was confined to lying down on a bed because she had a little fall. She watched Rose move through the kitchen, aware of images jerking from one moment to another, but not realizing time had passed until Rose stood before her with a steak. 

“I doubt this is the recommended dietary path for concussion recovery, but it’s what you have,” Rose said. “Your refrigerator looks like a meat locker.” 

“Sorry,” Jade said. “I ate through everything else way earlier. Want to split this?” 

“I had something while I was out, actually. But it’s sweet of you to offer.” 

“Oh, God, Rose. Don’t go back to Miss Formal And Serious on me now,” Jade said. “Come here.” 

Rose looked like she wanted to protest, but she sat down anyway. “I suppose,” she said, “you’re going to want my full life story now.” 

She had to take a moment to think it through, either because her brain was bleeding into itself or because she didn’t know _why_ she had wanted to know to begin with. She wanted Rose to be honest with her, she knew that. She wanted to know, for certain, that they were friends. And didn’t she know now? “I’m a kiss and run kind of gal!”

“Charming.” 

“Maybe we can do it again later.” 

“When you’re not eating steak.” 

“Did it suck for you?” Jade said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for it to—”

“If it were possible to nominate a person’s tongue as the head of a kissing committee, I wouldn’t hesitate to name yours,” Rose said quickly. “No, I was—it’s hard to say this without sounding silly after dealing with troll quadrants all those years ago—I suppose all that acclimation I did to troll culture has deteriorated after all those years. It just occurred to me that I don’t know anything you’ve done over these years beside be a wildly successful nuclear physicist.” 

“I don’t know about ‘wildly successful,’” Jade said. “And I think you mean _who_ I’ve been doing.” 

“Jade!” 

“Well, if that’s what you meant, then just say it!” Rose rolled her eyes. Jade chewed into her steak. Rose watched her eat, her eyes clear and wide. Jade, after a few bites, had to set the utensils down. What if she scared Rose off, sent Rose on another spiraling five year quest down the rabbit hole of gross occult? She liked Rose, she really did, but what was this and where was it going? She put the plate on the coffee table, suddenly queasy with nervousness. Or maybe that was the concussion. “You’re leaving tomorrow, right?” 

“I don’t have to go tomorrow, but I do have to go back to the city soon. I was only here to meet a friend and meet with the lawyers. I have to go back in tomorrow to sign some things off, and then I have to go back before my neighbor gets tired of feeding the cat.” 

“Oh,” Jade said. She supposed Rose had a point. They were, after all, people with lives. Moments to be blocked in between research and Space Baboon, and whatever writing Rose was doing in the city. She felt her chest clench, and had to breathe out before it became painful. Back to the labs by the end of the week. She thought wildly of asking whether Rose was interested in building a bunker for her, somewhere far from teaching and her PI. She thought of asking to run away. “Good thing I hit my head,” she said. “I have the whole day free.” 

“We can do that,” Rose said, with a smile that made Jade clutch at the upholstery of the couch. “I can be gentle.” 

“You sound like a bad porn movie!” 

“No I don’t.” 

“No, you do.” 

“I was about to kiss you, but I’ve changed my mind. Clearly what happened today was a fluke. We need to place a virile specimen of bovine in this room to encourage us further, or another unconscious body.” 

“I can pretend to be unconscious.” 

“I like you better with your eyes open,” Rose said, and slid closer. Jade tried to find a place for her legs to go so Rose could fit in, and could do nothing else but let her legs spread apart, until Rose’s hip was pressed against the inside of both thighs. “So I can watch you react as I undoubtedly ruin sex by blurting out one porno phrase after another.” She tilted her hip even closer, and her hand rested on Jade’s stomach—then she said, “Too much?” 

“No,” Jade said, and gasped when Rose cupped her breast, her wrist rotating in a single smooth arc. 

“I thought it might be,” Rose said. “But the more I think about it, the worse it becomes. I’m sick of wasting chances, I’m sick of losing people before I even think I have them. If this is our world now, then let’s make the best of it. Let’s go straight into it.” 

“Just take off your shirt,” Jade said, fighting to both get her head and hair out of the sweater at the same time. When she did, Rose was sitting before her, shirt tossed onto the floor and bra unclasped from behind, the straps limp around her biceps. She leaned in not to touch Jade’s stomach or chest, but to take her chin and kiss her again. Unsure at first, but growing steadier with each passing second. It was odd, but Jade understood: in the bare new world, isolated from one another for so long, the kisses were proof that there still things worth preserving, and things to be gained. 

 

Rose (Mobile)  
Oct 13 2:03:33AM  
[Attachment: IMG_2012355_35598.jpg] 

Dave (Mobile)  
Oct 13 5:23:41AM   
wtf is that lump in that picture   
not that im mad that you took an epicly long time to get off your ass and actually start returning texts like a NORMAL PERSON   
jfc even jade sends texts back faster than you do   
lets see its been five months   
but its cool im just glad youre ok   
srsly though   
what is that

Dave (Mobile)  
Oct 13 7:42:11AM   
gdi rose

Rose (Mobile)  
Oct 13 10:55:32PM  
Sorry about that. I thought I was capturing the majestic glory of the Catskill Mountains in the winter, the day after snow…?   
But according to my phone, I’ve misfired and sent you a picture of Jade’s tastefully covered thigh. Rest assured, I spent most of the day making it up to her. 

Dave (Mobile)  
Oct 13 10:58:49PM   
k   
im blocking you jsyk  


Rose (Mobile)   
Oct 15 12:35:07AM  
;) 


End file.
